


my body is a prison

by buries



Series: [challenge] 100 prompt fills [12]
Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Ghost Sex, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Mildly Dubious Consent, Sharing a Body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:13:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27522088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buries/pseuds/buries
Summary: Peter and Rebecca struggle to be together.
Relationships: Rebecca Jessel/Peter Quint
Series: [challenge] 100 prompt fills [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/904506
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	my body is a prison

**Author's Note:**

> So, I have a problem and it’s Rebecca/Peter. This was born from me randomly thinking of a line that appears in this fic—"For fuck’s sake, Peter!"—where I wanted to write a ghost sex story (fail sex as well) and ended up with something else. (It’s still a ghost sex story—who am I if I'm not writing smut?) This is set sometime in 1x07 and deviates from canon events slightly. 
> 
> This does contain references to death, ghosts, grief, and abuse. This does take leniency with the show's lore.
> 
> This was written to the prompt "prison". This is unbeta'd, so all mistakes are mine.

When he had been alive, it had been difficult to exist in the aftermath of Peter. His hands had always been purposeful and possessive, burning her and icing her all the same. Every time he left, she felt as if she was unbalanced. A touch of his hand against the small of her back and even an innocent brush of his fingertips to the side of hers always left her feeling grounded.

He’d wake and he’d be restless and she’d end up in his arms. In the beginning, she used to worry about being too loud or too tired for the next day, but in the end, nothing had ever mattered. Time was theirs and so was life.

His hands would span her ribs and hips and he’d open her up like she was his treasure to discover. In his arms, she didn’t feel as though she was worthless. His hands had always been kind to her even if his fiery insecurities weren’t. He’d press his apologies into her skin and deep inside of her, and she would always open up and accept them.

His hand had once curled around her neck, her pulse beating against it frantically, trying to push against his fingers. She hadn’t minded it when his mouth had been on her breast and his hips had been sharp against hers. 

Now, well, he’s gone.

She no longer likes anything around her neck. The aftermath of Peter is difficult to exist in. She slogs through mud, her feet pulled by endless ropes to tug her downwards into a pit of despair. Her anger is as sharp as a dagger or a hand of a deceased, old woman emerging from the depths of the lake.

Rebecca hates the aftermath.

*

A drenched, faceless woman with opaque pale skin had grabbed him by the throat and pressed so tightly against the fire of his pulse point that she had snuffed him out.

It’s difficult to believe at first. There is no such thing as ghosts nor women who lie deep beneath the otherwise peaceful-looking lake. Rebecca thinks to laugh in his face, to tear apart his excuses as if they’re wrapped in the softest of reeds. But he looks at her with his eyes wide and vulnerable, and she can read fear in the shape of his mouth.

"I don’t understand," she utters in disbelief. 

He bows his head. "Me neither, Becs."

Jealousy curdles in her gut, intertwining itself tightly with her grief, anger and relief at seeing him whole in front of her. 

That woman had possessed him more than she ever had.

*

It’s not easy being the one left behind. It had been easier to stomach the belief he had abandoned her for America—at least then she had hope that fate would bring them together, that it would lead her to the park or building or sidewalk that he happened to be on so she could flourish in his presence—but now that he’s gone…

It’s harder to be left behind. She has never been fond of it. He has left her to thicken and curdle grotesquely in the aftermath of his promises and sprouting hope.

He has gone where she can’t follow, and Rebecca isn’t quite sure if she wants to.

*

Peter’s absence had been a difficult adjustment in the beginning. She had been ropable and unforgiving, and while she hadn’t joined in on Jamie’s quips berating Peter, she had secretly enjoyed them. 

But now she just finds them hollow and her enjoyment almost dishonest. His hand is on her shoulder, a clammy presence that feels fuzzy. Rebecca can’t reach up to touch his fingertips, so she keeps her hands in her lap as she quietly listens to Jamie rattle on about flowers and Flora and Peter and how crazy Rebecca is to think he’d ever wander back onto the grounds of Bly Manor. She’ll get him with the shears and cut his pretty throat right out for hurting dear, darling and dead Rebecca.

Well, she’s not dead yet. Jamie treats her as if she is, as if the whole of her had been taken with Peter and killed between his thick fingers and sharp hands. She hadn’t been the one dragged along the floor with her neck trapped in an unforgiving and powerful device, but perhaps she had.

"He’s such a prick," Jamie says, leaning back in her chair. The gardens have been trimmed and they bloom beautifully, but all Rebecca sees is the dead leaves and stubborn weeds Jamie hadn’t been able to pull out.

Despite that, she likes it out here. It’s nice to be reminded of where the living and dead can coincide almost harmoniously. He is a dead flower sprouting from her vine and she refuses to let him fall to the ground to shrivel and be swept away.

"Don’t listen to her," Peter says quietly. There’s no point to him lowering his voice. None of them can hear him. He doesn’t come to them, an apparition of a carrot at the end of a stick. His hands used to be warm on her shoulders. She tells herself she can feel his fingers.

"Isn’t he, Bec?"

"Um…" She thinks she can feel the pressure of his fingers squeeze her shoulders. "Yes." She nods and exhales. "Yes, he is."

Peter is a prick. That’s all he had been in the beginning, a kind man, gentle with a rough voice that had spoken to her in the middle of the night and confessed everything he could ever confess to her like she was his confession and redemption. 

But he is a prick who deserves no absolution and she isn’t a woman who is capable of saving a man. She had left him to drown, after all; in the middle of the night, he had drowned as she slept with hope bubbling in her dreams as his air gurgled out from his lips.

She steels her shoulders beneath his hands, forging them to be as sharp as blades. She wants to cut him as badly as his temper and his death has cut her. She’ll trim herself of the dead flowers and the weeds that sprout along her wiry branches.

"He’s a prick," she says to Jamie’s bark of laughter. Something angry and ugly dislodges from her chest, and she feels lighter than she’s felt in a while. She cracks a smile and tears wide open. "And a horrible valet. He couldn’t even take me to America. Such false promises… Nothing he ever said was real."

*

It takes him a fortnight to reappear. He’s sullen, his long coat a heavy weight on his broad shoulders. Rebecca emerges from her ensuite with a towel wrapped around her, skin still damp from her shower.

She doesn’t jump when she sees him. She’s no longer afraid nor taken aback by his spontaneous appearances. Of course, she knows he can’t help when he appears. Peter has always been at the mercy of another.

"I’m still mad at you, just so you know," she says.

Peter’s brows furrow but he keeps his expression solemn. "I know," he says. "Becs—"

Lifting her hand, she shakes her head and silences him with a curve of her fingers in the air. "Trying another man’s batter doesn’t have a deeper meaning, Peter," she says. Her heart hammers wildly in her chest as he stands before her, hands in his pockets. "Tomorrow, when Owen asks me to try his cooking, I will. I want you to know that."

Peter swallows; she watches his Adam’s apple bob but can’t hear the thick sound of him relenting. "Okay, Becs," he says. His gaze drops briefly before he peers back up at her again. It’s not enough, not for her, but it’s all that he can give her.

He has no one else in this world, no one else in this manor. She knows why he appears for her, baring himself to her eye and her eye only.

"I want to see you tomorrow," she says, eyeing him unblinkingly. He’s disappeared one too many times when she takes her eyes off him. He is still a sight, no matter how angry she may be at him. "Will you promise me you’ll appear?"

"I’ll try, Becs," he says. He takes a step forward. "I’ll try for you. I’m getting better at controlling it."

"I know," she says. Something in her chest begins to build itself, heavy and thick, brick by brick. A part of her knows what it is—a guard against him, against what she, deep down, knows he’ll do.

Untucking her towel, she lets it drop to the floor as she stands before him. "Maybe we could try touching again."

*

Rebecca eats Owen’s batter to his amusement. He’s brighter, a happier man—someone appreciates his cooking, Hannah, would you look at that?—and Rebecca laughs and laughs.

She sees a flicker of Peter by the wall, hands in his pockets, his brows drawn into his face. The pinch of his lips is tight and twisted, and she watches him, uncaring of how she may look to the others, as his lips unfurl and he smiles.

It’s a start.

*

"Do you miss him?" Flora asks by the lake, blades of grass between her fingers. She’s trying to make a grass chain, but her knots have become loose and her interest has waded away. She looks up at her, young gaze piercing. "Peter. I miss him."

Rebecca inhales deeply and spies him in the distance. Still dressed in his trench coat, his hands disappear inside of the pockets like he has nothing else to hold onto. 

Gaze returning to Flora, she nods. "Yes," she says. She inhales deeply again and feels something move, and she finds her hand in Flora’s. It’s then that she realises that she’s crying. "I miss him."

Flora gives her a small smile, one that’s too kind and too old and too wise for her all at once. "I miss my parents," she says. "Every day. No one can blame you for missing him."

But she blames herself. Why hadn’t she awoken? Why hadn’t she followed him? Why hadn’t she tied him to the bed and refused to let him go until he fully trusted her once more?

If she had held onto him tightly, death would never have clutched his throat.

When she glances up at the distance, across the lake and into the thick reeds, he’s still there. For once, he’s still there.

*

They’re better at being together now than they ever were before. Rebecca wonders if there’s something to be said of her in that, that she can love a dead man better than one who was alive.

When his coat falls to the floor, it does so silently. She looks at the pile of clothing on the floor with a sadness that spreads through her bones. Peter stands before her naked, his skin almost translucent in the moonlight. She wants to touch and taste him like she had an eternity ago. Was his skin warm or rough? Soft and cool?

She lifts her gaze to his and can pretend for just a moment that nothing has changed. Nothing is wrong; he’s within arm’s reach and hers to touch.

But then he reaches out to brush his fingers against her naked side and the illusion is broken.

*

Hannah accompanies her through the woods as Flora and Miles flock together up ahead. The ground is uneven and isn’t fit for the flats she wears, but nothing will stop Flora or Miles from surprising her.

They wish to cheer her up. Her melancholy is beginning to birth ghosts. Her lips form a heavier line than before and her smile never seems to lift her cheeks and brighten her eyes. Flora wishes to fix it, with everyone’s assistance, of course. A family affair, or something to that effect. 

"What’s the origin story now?" Hannah asks with an amused smile. Her hands are behind her back as they walk, her footfalls slow and calm. It’s the first time Hannah has stopped flurrying about.

Rebecca inhales deeply and smiles as Flora takes Miles’ hand and breaks into a skip. "They say Peter and a little, faceless girl told them to come down here," she says. 

Hannah laughs lightly. "Did they now? I never thought Peter was one for a woodsy adventure."

"Neither did I." Rebecca shrugs. "Maybe I didn’t know him at all."

On her other side, he walks with his hands in his pockets. His footfalls make no noise as twigs remain unsnapped beneath his boot. His head is bowed and the air around him is cold and dismal.

"Sometimes love blinds you," Hannah says, looking far ahead. "Sometimes it blinds you to what you want and sometimes it fills you with fear." She looks to Rebecca with a kind smile. "No one can blame you for loving that man. You’ll find you’re better off without him Rebecca. The world will be at your fingertips."

"Says the woman who doesn’t live," he grumbles. Rebecca presses her lips together to hold back her retort. "What the fuck’s she on about, Becs? All she does is stay in this manor and wake, work, and sleep."

"And what about you, Hannah?" Rebecca turns her face towards the other woman, wanting desperately to tuck Peter away. "When will you begin to live?"

They step away from one another, allowing the distance to spread them as the well approaches, an immovable obstacle neither can leap over. Hannah remains on one side as Rebecca and Peter walk on the other.

Both women reach out to brush their fingers against the lip of the well. 

*

The fabric of his trench coat is cold and damp. It surprises her, the fact that she can feel it between her fingers. Before, it had felt like a thin mist, as if she had been trying to capture delicate and thin spiderwebs against her fingertips.

She’s slow when she peels it off him. He watches her with amusement, his gaze unblinking. It’s almost as if he’s afraid if he blinks she’ll lose her hold on him.

His skin is warm and clammy beneath her fingers, nothing like how it used to feel before. When he stands before her naked, she can see the slight bruising of his neck. Reaching up to touch it, he hisses.

"Sorry," she murmurs. The bruise is there and then it isn’t, fluctuating in and out of view. Standing on the tips of her toes, she presses her lips to his pulse point and feels nothing.

Peter’s warm in a way that feels cold, and his fingers are gentler on her than they ever have been before. When he grips her hand, it’s with a tight, bone-breaking and fearful grip that pinches her skin before it becomes nothing. She’d like to think he’s afraid of letting her go.

It’s easy to pretend that nothing has changed when he’s naked above her. She kisses his skin, his cheeks and the slope of his nose, and his mouth is greedy and hungry as he kisses across her skin. His lips feel like feathers and silk and cold dew. She can feel him thinking aloud, keeping his fingers as solid as he can.

Her skin hums with a strange and intoxicating buzz, with the imprints of his essence and determination. It’s the most she’s felt of him; she’s beginning to grow drunk on it, lost to her own inhibitions of enjoying being wanted so desperately he clings to her.

His fingers thrust inside of her, thumb brushing against her clit. Rebecca pants and holds her hand over her own mouth, pretending the smoothness of her smaller palm is his rough and bigger one. His hands are on her hips, one sliding along her belly and his tongue is flat and solid as he licks up into her, nose pressed against her cunt and her thighs tightening their headlock on him. He’s still as greedy in death as he is in life to touch and possess her.

Digging her heels into the bed, she thinks she kicks it right through him. His fingers are rough and sharp, tangible and real, and she can feel the beating of his dead heart through his fingertips. His skin is clammy and damp, and it glistens like it’s coming to life.

And then she feels nothing at all.

Opening her eyes, she glares at the blank ceiling. Her hips are unburdened and her flushed skin is cold. 

He’s gone.

"For fuck’s sake, Peter!"

Sitting up in bed, she waits for him. He never comes, and neither does she.

*

Sitting by the lake, she sighs when she feels the hem of his coat brush against her arm. It’s featherlight and ticklish, and she hates it all at once.

"Hey," he says. He sits down beside her, grass crumpling beneath him. When she reaches out to touch his hand, her fingers sink right through his. "I know it’s hard," he says. "And I’m sorry."

"What are you sorry for?" She gazes out at the lake, angry and hurt and filled with a grief she isn’t quite sure what to do with. How does she grieve for a man who is still so alive to her? "It’s not your fault you’re—" She tugs in the words along with her hands, placing them in her lap.

"That I’m what?" His voice is gruff and his gaze pierces her profile. She does everything she can to avoid glancing at him. "I’m what, Becs? You need to say it."

Licking her lips, she shakes her head. 

"Rebecca—"

"You’re a dick, Peter," she says, facing him. Her frown is deep and the corners of her lips fall angrily. "You’re a fucking dick. You walk around the manor as if you own it, as if you’re untouchable. You’re a dick for dying."

He nods and glances down, but his gaze remains on her. His eyes are slightly wet, and she wonders, briefly, if he’s upset. 

Good, he should be. He’s been entirely too calm, entirely too broken. He has embraced his death with such uncharacteristic warmth that she wants to shove him.

So, she does. She stands tall, taller than him in spirit; he rises with her, as if tethered to her command. Hands meet solid, cold flesh.

"Why did you get out of bed, Peter?" She shoves him again and he doesn’t move. "Why did you have to get out of fucking bed and leave me all alone?"

He inhales sharply as the wind rustles the leaves and lake, and she sees him glance out towards the water. Rebecca stares at his profile before she looks out at the lake. She sees him standing by the reeds on the other side, coat pulled back as his hands hide in his pockets.

The lake’s reflection of him is troublesome. She can see his silhouette elongated on its surface, skin greyed and rotten, eyes wide open and lifeless, the scar of his lip gone, hair now in patches. 

When she returns her gaze to him—the Peter beside her, not the one in the distance—she finds he is gone.

*

It’s later, much later, that she concludes he hasn’t embraced his death with a warm hand at all. The evidence laid out before her tells her everything she’s afraid to know.

Death isn’t a coat he slides onto his arms and shoulders and feels the weightlessness dance around him. It doesn’t empower him in the way she thought freedom would. It weighs him down like rocks in his pockets and he is drowning inside of it.

He’s afraid, and she can’t save him. She was never able to.

*

He never means to tuck her away.

She stands before him naked once more, desperate to feel his hands on her skin. Her room is quiet, smaller than it used to feel. It hides them away, a little alcove for them to disappear beneath and pretend that he is here.

In his presence, she feels like a woman without water, lost in a desert as mirage after mirage appears before her. Each one tempts her, and she reaches out to touch what’s in front of her, but is never able to grasp it.

None if it is real, but Rebecca foolishly hopes that one day, when she reaches out, it will be tangible in her hands.

Fingers brush against clammy skin. She inhales, happy, and then— 

She’s in her bed, with him wrapped around her. Body warm, fingers hard and almost bruising as he cuddles her to him. The memory is warm—and it’s that, just a memory. She falls into it despite that, desperate to feel his solid body against her back. He is more of a pillar in her dreams than he is in reality, and she clings to his arms like he is a buoy.

Rebecca can feel the soft hum of her heart as it beats wildly in her chest. Far away, she feels as if she’s tucked beneath water. 

When she wakes, her fingers are inside of her body and Peter stands by the bed, smiling.

"We were together, Becs," he says breathlessly. His chest heaves and she thinks she can spy a glisten to his skin. He almost looks alive.

She bites her bottom lip and doesn’t permit herself the luxury of demolishing his hope. They weren’t together, not like before—Rebecca’s skin feels cold and untouched, and while her fingers are wet as she pulls them out of herself, she knows it wasn’t her.

She smiles, a little tense, and says, "Yes, we were."

*

He never takes her to the room tucked away in the manor as if it’s some forbidden secret. The doors remain closed despite her interest to tiptoe inside. She wants to see the room he last saw, to see if remnants of him remain.

Her room has become a sanctuary, one that she’s beginning to resent. The mirror is too small and the space isn’t big enough for her to pretend.

She holds the polaroid camera this time. He stands before her, looking displeased, just as he had when his skin had been warm and he had been tethered to this world.

"Let me show you how beautiful you are," she says to him with a playful smile. She thinks she spies a blush on his cheeks as she lifts the camera to take a photo of his face.

She lets the photograph fall to the floor and takes another. Then another. One after the other, the photographs fall to the floor. She lets each photograph plummet to the wooden floorboards to rest at the bottom of its lake bed, not once peeking at it.

His arm is around her and she’s tucked to his solid chest. He is warm and ticklish and she feels as if she is in the embrace of a silky wind. She takes a photo of them together, of his face tucked into her shoulder.

When he’s inside of her, _is_ her, he takes a photo of them together. When she wakes, it’s the only photo she can keep—her face is warm, her smile small. He isn’t behind her as she can see her brown eyes are now blue. The rest are blank, save for her mirror and her reflection. 

Rebecca has never felt so alone.

*

At one point, she realises that if she wants to be with him just as he planned, she has to die.

It’s in the evening of one of his worse days. He can’t hold her. His arms barely wrap around her as vines to a tree. Her naked skin goes untouched and his aggravation at not being able to trace her newest bruise is hot and sharp.

To anyone else’s eye, she sits alone in the kitchen. To hers, he sits opposite her, as he had once done so, back when they were merely a valet and au pair to one another. She misses him sitting beside her, a warm and familiar presence, with his hand on her leg and then underneath her skirt.

In front of her, he tents his fingers and his elbows sit against the table, leading her to wonder if he can touch the table and not her.

"It doesn’t feel real, does it?" he asks.

Nothing feels remotely real anymore. Ghosts walk Bly Manor. A woman sleeping at the bottom of the lake awakens to wander the manor’s halls. Not one to have ever believed in ghosts, she finds herself now terrified of them all.

She mimics his posture, elbows firm against the tabletop, hands tented together. Resting her chin on her knuckles, she sighs. "No," she says. "It’s not."

Rebecca doesn’t think it’s worth it.

*

Cracking open her door, she lingers behind it as if it’s a shield. It’s almost midnight, the manor is dark, and the children are asleep. She’d tucked them into their little nests tightly after listening to Flora tell her how important it is to sleep with the door closed—nothing can get you, Miss Jessel, nothing at all.

She stays awake and watches the quiet and dark corridor. It’s eery and empty, a black abyss of nothing.

When she blinks, she sees her. A woman in white, drenched to the bone, black hair tangling like an overgrown nest of roots. She watches as the woman moves at a leisurely pace, footfalls familiar with the route they take. She disappears into the forbidden room for what feels like an age before she returns, hands empty, face lost.

Rebecca’s heart is in her throat and a hand is sharp on her shoulder. A palm covers her mouth firmly as she screams.

Muffled, she’s pulled back. The door closes as Peter remains behind her, a warm and strange sensation. His hand doesn’t leave her mouth, firmly tucked beneath her nose.

"What are you doing?" he hisses harshly. She momentarily thinks to inform him that no one can hear him—no one ever can—but Peter already knows. Being dead isn’t any different to being alive.

Pulling away from her, she turns around to face him. Cheeks flushed, hair askew, she doesn’t adjust her nightgown’s straps as they slip from her shoulders. Her heart races terrifyingly fast in her chest, a reminder that she’s alive.

"Are you trying to get yourself killed?"

Rebecca thinks yes.

*

When she sits by the lake with him beside her, she leans her head against his arm and watches as the water becomes a mirror for what lies beneath its surface. She sees herself, broken and gone, and she hates him for it.

It’s the only feeling she has: hate. It’s palpable, mortifying… it makes her feel sharper than anything has ever made her feel before. Her eyes slant in the light and she closes her eyes momentarily, wondering if the sun will ever burn her skin again.

Instead, her face is mottled and her eyes are blank, a light blue obscuring her warm brown. The lake calls to her now, like a mother to a child. 

She thinks to shove him again, as she has done so many countless times. She hadn’t shoved him when she needed to most, tucked too deeply away, hands tied, her strength floating just out of reach.

"Still think I’m a dick?" he asks with a light laugh. His mouth is lopsided—she can tell; she can see it in the reflection of the lake without so much as needing to peer into her new mirror.

"Yes," she says with a warm smile. She peers up at him and presses her nose to his shoulder. "You are my dick."

He chuckles and tilts his head to rest his cheek against her hair. Even when he’s gone, she feels warm, like his arm is tucked around her once more. 

She can pretend in those moments of his departure, where he disappears behind an odd wooden door, that nothing has changed. She is still whole and still waiting for him to grace Bly Manor’s doorstep again, and then she will go to America.

In death, she finds it easier to dream.

*

When she was alive, it was difficult to exist in the aftermath of Peter.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to give Rebecca more time to exist post-Peter's death, struggle more with living while he's dead, and gift her some agency over Peter while also honouring his hold on her. I feel like we never got to see Rebecca's grief journey and so I wanted to explore it in this.
> 
> You can find me at [tumblr](http://finnicks.tumblr.com).


End file.
